ELH

ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204

Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure

Carolyn Lesjak

Dear, dear! How Queer everything is today!
And yesterday things went on just as usual.

--Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

In 1966, Herbert Marcuse, returning to Eros and Civilization to add a "political preface," asked the crucial question "Can we speak of a juncture between the erotic and political dimension?" ¹ This question was prompted by what Marcuse saw as his overly optimistic assumption when the book was originally published in 1955 that "the achievements of advanced industrial society would enable man to reverse the direction of progress, to break the fatal union of productivity and destruction, liberty and repression--in other words, to learn the gay science of how to use the social wealth for shaping man's world in accordance with his Life Instincts, in the concerted struggle against the Purveyors of Death." ² Our alienation from the language alone which Marcuse uses (and even from his more tempered reflections in the preface) speaks to the distance which now separates us from the 1960s and its language of liberation. If in 1966 Marcuse could still turn to the international arena and the revolution in Vietnam, specifically, as a site for at least "the historical chance of turning the wheel of progress to another direction," what we now face is the opening of Vietnam to the West and market-oriented economic reforms. ³ Clearly, given our changed historical moment, the liberation of both eros and civilization does not lie with an (impossible) return to an equation of the two. But, as I want to argue, nor does it lie with a rejection of the language of eros or pleasure itself. Rather, it is the nature of the "juncture" between the erotic and the political of which Marcuse speaks that needs to be reconsidered.

The seeds for this reconceptualization, I suggest, lie in the work of Oscar Wilde and his attempts to create a new economy of pleasure based on the paradoxical notion of what I will call the labors of hedonism; the notion, that is to say, that pleasure is something to be [End Page 179] worked at and worked for. Or, as Bertolt Brecht fashions it, "pleasure takes some achieving, I'd say." ⁴ A reading of Wilde's work in this light involves two important theoretical shifts: first, to show how the notion of pleasure in his texts dovetails with notions of use versus exchange value, commodification and commodity logic, the utopian and the everyday; and second, to uncouple the concept of pleasure from sexuality per se and to link it instead to a more expansive notion of use. These twin operations--the detachment of pleasure from sexuality and the connection of pleasure to a new kind of use--not only link pleasure to what Marcuse refers to as the "political fight" or the larger political and economic structures which define and delimit pleasure, but, in turn, excavate the space for a more complex and varied understanding of pleasure.

A reconsideration of how use and the utopian function in Wilde equally requires a reassessment of his genealogy as a political thinker. Wilde's gestures toward socialism have commonly been disregarded as mere polemic, yet another rhetorical feint in Wilde's repertoire of personae. Renewed attention to his notion of use, however, shows him more firmly placed as a fellow-traveler of sorts whose work represents a continuation of the English socialist project of the 1880s, and especially of William Morris. Morris and Wilde, despite their stylistic differences, each focus on ways of overcoming the increasing separation of labor from any notion of pleasure. As surplus value and profit, that is to say, become the primary motive of production, labor is instrumentalized as a commodity which can only realize itself within the terms of capitalist production. As such, it becomes merely a means of existence, alienated from its own self-realization. Pleasure is opposed to abstract labor, but simultaneously defined by it negatively--as that...